Editorial

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In This Issue

This far, we have learned about installation and setup of the PowerShell environment. You should now have a foundation of SQL Server PowerShell. We now are ready to learn about Objects in SQL PowerShell. More »

Many companies now have a requirement to keep data for long periods of time. While this data does have to be available if requested, it usually does not need to be accessible by the application for any current transactions. Data that falls into this category are a good candidate for archival. More »

What do i mean by shell packages? You’re spot on – that’s an excellent question to begin with. For the purpose... More »

Editorial - A Software Warranty

Years ago I worked in a large company on the operations team. We were responsible for all production issues for the 6,000 people and the assorted machines, devices, and applications that come with a large workforce. There was a department that was aligned with our group that focused on engineering and various development groups that built different applications. The engineering group was good at working closely with the production team to ensure smooth deployments, but they weren't on call and would at times respond slowly to develop solutions when problems occurred. They were, however, better than the development groups who often sent code to be deployed, and accepted bug reports back, but provided little support or assistance for problems with their code.

I ran across this link from a DevOps person called You Write It, You Support It in the Brent Ozar, PLF newsletter. The piece makes a case for the problems that occur with some deployments, like a lack of, or surplus, of logging, switches to turn features on/off, error handling, and more. It's a pretty good description of typical problems I've often seen, and it calls for developers to support the features that they write, even in production systems.

I like this idea, though I don't think that it should be a continuous expectation with developers required to support their code forever. I would like to see developers giving their code a "warranty" of sorts, perhaps a couple months of priority support when code is deployed into live environments with developers taking responsibility and responding to calls, even after hours.

There are arguments to be made that developers' time is better spent enhancing applications and applying their creativity to new ideas, but this leads to a human frailty. Too often we view a job finished as a job completed, and that's not always the case. Doing a job well means more than completion. It implies a level of craftsmanship and pride in the finished product, both from the developer and the client.

Developers should write code that works. If it doesn't, then it's not really finished and should be fixed. With that contract in place, we usually find that the developer spends a bit more time ensuring the product is built in a quality way that reduces the need for much support.

SQL Server 2012 Integration Services Design Patterns is a book of recipes for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Design patterns in the book show how to solve common problems encountered when developing data integration solutions. Because you do not have to build the code from scratch each time, using design patterns improves your efficiency as an SSIS developer. In SSIS Design Patterns, we take you through several of these snippets in detail, providing the technical details of the resolution.

Yesterday's Question of the Day

Which of the following statements is true of table variables in SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, and 2011? (select 6)

By Tom Thomson

Answer:

The primary key can be multi-column

An unclustered index can be on multiple columns

Multi-column check constraints are allowed

They can have an identity column

They permit multi-column unique constraints

They can have only one ROWGUID column

Explanation: Primary key and unique constraints can be included in the declaration of a table variable either as column constraints or as table constraints; declaring them as table constraints permits multi-column versions; since all such constraints involve indexes, there can be multiple independent indexes, and clearly these can't all be the clustered index, so declaring these constraints allows unclustered indexes to be created . Check constraints also are allowed at both table and column level, and an identity column and a ROWGUID can be declared. Of course all constraints have to be incuded in the declaration, they can't be added by separate DDL statements. See DECLARE @local_variable in BOL.

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ForEach Loop to delete all files in folder.
- Hi...
I went to the following URL:
[url]http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson/archive/2008/04/17/ssis-deleting-a-group-of-files.aspx[/url]
for some help on how to configure a For each loop to delete all the...

many to many relations
- I have one table and the columns are bookingreference,complaintreference,category1,category2,desriptionofthecomplaint,
one bookingref have one complaintid,
one complaintid have many bookingreferences,
one complaintid have many...

Identity column and the seed
- I have seen a strang thing about the identity column of seed, and cannot find why, please help.
My situation is...

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